Jeffrey Shaw: Legible City Hong Kong

M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, will present Legible City Hong Kong, the latest iteration of the pioneering media artwork Legible City (1989–91) by Jeffrey Shaw (b. 1944), made in collaboration with Hong Kong fiction writer Dung Kai-cheung (b. 1967). In this work, visitors are invited to ride a stationary bicycle, which is connected to a large screen that displays a digital landscape of Hong Kong, where the rider roams freely. The interactive installation will open to the public free of charge at M+’s Found Space from Friday, July 19 to Sunday, October 6, 2024. On Friday nights during the exhibition period, the M+ Facade will livestream from the installation, showing visitors’ journeys in real time. On other nights, the facade will show a video recording of the work.  

Legible City Hong Kong presents a digital landscape based on the Central, Sheung Wan, and Sai Ying Pun neighbourhoods in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The buildings are replaced by 3D bold text adapted from the third part of Dung’s novel Hong Kong Type: A Love Letter Late for One Hundred and Fifty Years, a tragic love story set in nineteenth-century Hong Kong. As visitors journey through this city of words, they encounter Dung’s text rendered in Hong Kong Type, a movable typeface invented in the city more than a hundred years ago. Legible City Hong Kong is Shaw’s tribute to the city, its remarkable topography, and the many stories that have unfolded here. More information is available here.

About Jeffrey Shaw
Jeffrey Shaw (b. 1944, Australia) has been a leading figure in new media art since its emergence from the performance, expanded cinema, and installation paradigms of the 1960s to their technologised and virtualised forms in the present day. His artworks are milestones of technological and cultural innovation that have had a seminal impact on the theory, design, and application of digital media in art, society, and industry, and his artistic achievements are among the most cited in new media literature. He has exhibited at various galleries and institutions, including Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kunsthalle Bern, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Hayward Gallery in London.

About Dung Kai-cheung
Dung Kai-cheung (b. 1967, Hong Kong) is one of the most prominent writers in Hong Kong. His work explores the possibilities of literary genres and forms and encompasses subject matter from historical recreation to futuristic imagination. He began writing in the early 1990s and has published more than thirty titles in Chinese. Since winning the Unitas Fiction Award for New Writers (1994), Dung has received numerous literary awards in Hong Kong and Taiwan, including the Jury Awards from the Dream of the Red Chamber Award: The World’s Distinguished Novel in Chinese (2006, 2008, 2020); the Hong Kong Book Prize (2011, 2017, 2018, 2020); Artist of the Year (Literary Arts) from the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards (2008); Writer of the Year at Hong Kong Book Fair (2014); and Grand Prize (Fiction) at the Taipei International Book Exhibition (2019).

About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, it is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. M+ is a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.